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To: REH who wrote (6007)	8/1/1998 8:29:00 AM
From: REH	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93625

Co. sees future in ESP -- QuickLogic's new ICs to wed hard and soft cores Crista Souza Silicon Valley- Attempting to make an end-run around the programmable-logic market's leaders, QuickLogic Corp. is combining hard-wired intellectual-property cores with user-configurable logic to create a new class of device: the Embedded Standard Product (ESP). While industry leaders Altera Corp. and Xilinx Inc. battle it out on the density field, QuickLogic is moving away from its role as a "blank slate" device provider, and will instead provide chips with built-in, system-level functionality, said Tom Hart, president and chief executive of the Sunnyvale, Calif., IC supplier. "We see this as a bridge from the standard-product world, using building blocks that will allow customers to get to system-on-a-chip," Hart said. FPGA suppliers are starting to offer soft (reconfigrable) cores, to fill gates in ever-larger programmable devices for complex functions. But soft cores often lack the performance, physical I/O interface, silicon efficiency, and pin-out stability of a hard-coded ASIC core, Hart said. The ESP will provide an alternative for developing customized, high-value functions such as 66-MHz PCI, Rambus DRAM, or Fibre Channel controller interfaces. ESP devices will integrate a hard-coded standard function, as many as 100,000 FPGA gates, a 200-MHz interface between the two segments, and configuration logic to enable customization of the embedded block. QuickLogic will also offer a library of soft cores for embedding additional functions. Depending on how the two dominant FPGA suppliers respond, QuickLogic's ESP family could give the tiny supplier a much-needed spark, analysts said. In 1997, QuickLogic held less than 2% of the $2.1 billion PLD market, according to Dataquest Inc., San Jose. To its advantage, QuickLogic's antifuse architecture produces a smaller, less expensive die, said Dataquest's Bryan Lewis. The trick will be to choose the right functions to embed, and then to muster the resources to develop them. "Considering QuickLogic's size, alliances will be critical to make this fly," Lewis said. In addition, the company will face "serious competition" from Lucent Technologies' Microelectronics Group, which has a similar FPGA strategy and a strong position in standard-cell ASICs to back it up, said Allen Leibovitch of International Data Corp., Mountain View, Calif. The initial ESPs are slated to be rolled out in the third quarter, starting with a high-performance embedded-RAM family. The first RAM part is expected to combine 25 Kbits of 5-ns dual-port RAM with 60,000 usable FPGA gates. Customers can use this product to build 150-MHz FIFOs, Hart said. QuickLogic is set to release an ESP integrating a 66-MHz PCI controller in the fourth quarter.